The Bag

This is the bag that I keep my styrofoam scraps in. Now, I don't keep useless scraps in there; just decent ones. Irregular squares, but of a good size... lots of solid, undamaged chunks. I think that it'll really help me to do more terrain as the inclination hits. I think it's a good thing and I keep it close by when I undertake projects like the ones I've been doing this week.

That was all fine and well till a problem arose.

Yesterday I was putting my shoes on next to the bag when I saw something move. I glanced over quickly and there it was: One very huge spider peering out of the bag at me. I gasped a bit and my heart stopped, and then he did the worst possible thing he could do: He turned and dove into the bag without a trace.

Now there's a giant spider living in my foam bag. Being the way that I am about spiders, I am no longer able to plunge my hand in, looking for scraps... as I am afraid he will capture me and web me up and lay eggs in my face.

This sucks.

Finish Your Army Day™

I have two days until the megabattle. Aside from some work-related duties (which are light) and a trip to the bank, I have nothing else I need to do besides get ready.

Today I finish my army.

Tomorrow I finish the table.

It's as simple as that.

And.... Scene.

The Striking Scorpion shrine is complete.

Brownzilla

You're going to get a lot of short, sparse updates over the next few days as things are brought along.

The Scorp shrine is painted and is now drying. Time: 2:07 AM EST.



It looks like a giant pudding cake made by a blind guy.

Closer and Closer

The megabattle is on Saturday. We start pretty early.

I've got a list of things I still have to paint between now and then:
- The second half of the table I'm working on.
- Two sand dunes.
- Finish the Scorpion shrine.
- Paint the Wraithgate.
- If I can, make another shrine (Fire Dragons).
- If I can, paint some trees (the jungle type from GW).
- Finish the Soul Shrines.

And that's just the table. Not my army. Just the table itself.

I have two full days to paint plus a half day on Wednesday.

I'm screwed.

I've decided to settle in tonight. Some interesting DVD on the TV, some junk food on hand, loose-fitting clothing... and finish as much of this as I can before dawn.

Keith

I have a sort of love-hate thing going on with Keith. Allow me to explain.

Right now I'm saddled with the job of creating a game table for the 5 of my friends who are coming over in... (checking watch...) 4 days. If you follow my blog, you already know this. As a result, I've been burning the midnight oil to make sure I get something decent on the table, and so far I'm happy with my work. I don't think I'm the only one, either; today I got a comment here on Hammerblog about my Striking Scorpion shrine. "Corey my man, this is some of the best terrain I have ever seen - and I've been doing this for over 15 years!" See, that's the sort of thing that keeps me going. Right now with so much to do in so little time, I need everything I can get to keep me going.

So tonight I'm talking to Keith on MSN and I ask him what he thinks of my Scorpion Shrine (as it is depicted in my in the "Temple Of Chocolate" post). He says it's the best out of all of them. This puzzles me because I think it's the weakest of the three, and it's been driving me crazy trying to think of how to improve it. He then explains to me that he's "disappointed" with my work on the Dark Reaper shrine, as he thought I would have taken the time to position all the skulls so they were face-up. When I asked about the Dire Avenger shrine, he explained that there "wasn't much there to hate" (meaning that it's too sparse) and that the red of the gate doesn't work with the table. Keith has a sort of "tough love" thing that he likes to do which is one part backseat driver, one part drill sargent and two parts genuine desire to help. Basically, Keith expected better of me for these shrines.

I asked him what he thought of the Scorpion shrine, as I myself was not fond of it and I thought maybe he could help me put my finger on what was wrong. He sort of did, sort of didn't; he said "loose dirt". Those two words got me thinking...

See, this is where I ended up with the shrine since we last spoke:



Drybrushed, but not looking like stone. Not looking like anything other than a bunch of chocolate hunks stacked in a pile.

Keith's comment "loose dirt" set in motion a chain of events that turned me on to something more than what I'd been doing. Loose dirt. He was right. Loose dirt. The shrine needed to be busted. It needed to be broken. It needed to be rough. I noticed how the jagged rock under the Karandras statue looked great, and I decided it was time to make this thing look lived-in.



That wasn't enough. I then carefully tried to figure out where on this shrine one would fine piled-up sand, and then got to work with the glue. I also added bits of torn foam to make it look like bigger rocks had come loose. This is what I ended up with.



So now I wait while the glue dries. I will then apply the brown paint, do some drybrushing and generally get it looking like it's been blown to smithereens and then worn down over hundreds of years of disuse.

Keith fails to understand several things about my current situation:
- I actually want to quit Warhammer 40k. Motivating myself to do this wasn't like falling off a log. I consider doing this stuff as "taking one for the team".
- Over the six months that we've been planning this game, I am the only one of the planned participants who has worked on the table or the scenery.
- I have about four days to finish all the terrain and my own army. Alone, without help.
- I keep getting reports about how the other participants are currently working on things like Space Marines, which suggests to me that their Eldar armies are done and, with their spare time, they are turning their attention to other things instead of helping out with the table or whatever. I try not to let this bother me because, hey... I volunteered.
- I lack certain personality traits which would motivate me to fiddle with 25mm scale skulls in wet drywall compound (that dries while I'm using it) as I attempt to keep the plaster out of the eye sockets just so someone can glance at it from 6" away and notice the skulls all face up.
- I like the red. Anyone else who would like to make a Dire Avenger shrine to use instead is welcome to. My psychic powers tell me that no-one is likely to step forward. There are Marines to paint, after all.

So is it time to say "FU" Keith? Not exactly. There's no denying that he got it bang-on about the Scorpion shrine. He was right about that. I can't deny it. I wanted to... but I couldn't. So I got down and dirty and made that bitch into all it could be rather than just all I could get away with. Without Keith I wouldn't have gone that extra mile. Without Keith I wouldn't have been motivated to go back to the drawing board and demand better of myself. Without Keith I would have just rested on the accolades. In short, the fact that Keith took a dump on my terrain made me determined to make it better, and that will create a better experience for everyone on Saturday.

So do I owe Keith a "thank you" or a "FU"? Keith would say the former. I believe a bit from column a, a bit from column b.

The Temple Of Chocolate

It's not done... but I wanted to show what it looks like before I drybrush away the Willy Wonka effect.

Dire Avenger Shrine

Not much to say that you haven't already heard. You should know pretty much how this got done, so just take a look at the pics and... Mazeltov!

Next up... the Scorpion Shrine.

Scorpion Shrine

As you can see, there's a little hole for Ferdinand to live in. Now I just wait for the glue to dry. I sanded all the brick edges and am rubbing them all down with a rock to rough them up (something I learned here).

A Conversation on AIM With My Friend Peter, Who Is Not a Warhammer Player

Corey: I'm going whole hog on Warhammer stuff right now
Corey: I have a big, big game on Saturday
Peter: given up the will to live, huh?
Corey: And then after that I plan to go into at least semi-retirement.
Peter: you're going to be like michael jordan
Peter: retiring from basketball only to take up baseball
Peter: then discovering he sucks at baseball, and going back to basketball
Peter: you'll spend a year playing D&D or some even more gay-ass shit than warhammer
Corey: I'm hoping to retire from Warhammer and go to sex. Here's hoping I don't fail at that and have to go back to Warhammer.
Corey: Because I wouldn't. I'd just go to suicide.
Peter: that's fair

Shrine Assembly Line

I know this is kinda nuts and all, but I have less than a week to finish everything I need to do if I want to be ready for the big game on Saturday. So here's a little progress report on what I'm doing...

The first thing is that I do a lot of washes with watered down Snakebite Leather, so I finally decided to just mix up a batch and put it in an empty pot. I've gone through half of the mixed up batch already, but I like having a pot around with this written on it:



The Dire Avenger shrine is slowly under way. You'll see that I've done some drybrushing and inking on the two dragons, which will be arranged as guardians for the shrine (not "Guardians", but guardians, dig?), and I've also stolen the mirror bird-bath thing from the Lord Of The Rings Galadriel set. I used a CD (actually not a "CD", but a clear plastic protective CD-shaped thing which is used in spindels of blank media) and a large model base (sanded down to make it smoother, like the CD thingie it's glued to) to create a raised area (which will sit upon a foam foundation), and carved some runes into them with my dremel. I primed it white and then used Snake Wash on it. I was going to follow with some Bleached Bone, but damn... doesn't the Snake Wash make that thing look good? Man, I really love that. I'm probably going to leave it as-is (though I may add some gems). It just goes to show that Snakebite Leather (along with Bleached Bone) is one of the most interesting paints that GW makes. It's completely inconsistent, but in the most interesting possible way. I will likely accent the ruddy brown and the bone with some painted red runes and, of course, the weathering drybrush technique I used on the Reaper shrine (which is sort of the hallmark of the whole table, as you can see in my sample pieces).

I'm going to work on some more ideas for this and develop it a bit. I want to try to get some gates built that look like the ones in the Iyanden Shrine of Asur rune. Those are a typical Chinese-style of gate and, seeing as I am going to try to get some sort of flame into the bird-bath thing, I might as well go for broke trying to make it look like the real thing.



Ferdinand is finally getting his day as I begin work on the Scorpion shrine. It's going to be built out of blocks. I was thinking I could make them out of pieces with the blocks drawn on, but I want to make them really look weathered and worn. I'm going to try to add something that looks like tiki torches. We'll have to see; it requires some bitz that I don't have just yet.



One thing I do intend to do (if I can) is put statues of the various Phoenix Lords in each shrine (Maugen Ra is in there, but I'll be doing something with Asurmen, Fuegan, and Karandras which will be similar).

Between the Scorpion, Reaper and Dire Avenger shrines, the Wraithgate, and the bunch of Soul Shrines and their pedestals, we should have a good collection of stuff on the table. The only thing I don't quite know what I'm going to do with now is the Fire Dragon temple, but I have some ideas...

Dark Reaper Shrine

Not much to tell, but lots to see. You've already seen the beginning of this piece of terrain in an earlier post, but my main problem with what you saw there is that it really did look blocky; like three square pieces of foam stacked on top of three round ones. I firmly believe that making things too complicated is what kills otherwise excellent projects, but it just looked a little too simple. What I go for when I'm doing terrain is that the foam should "disappear" and the illusion replaces it. That wasn't happening in that first design, so I sliced up what was effectively the second floor and made it look like a foundation, a long pillar in the middle, and a roof with a dome. Carved out an alcove for the Maugen Ra "statue" and then began the fun part: Covering it with drywall compound and LOTS of skulls.



I based it all with that Canadian Tire black I bought months ago, and then drybrushed with GW Shadow Grey. An almost equal amount of Bleached Bone went on top (some day I'm going to write a long article about how amazing Bleached Bone is) and then a dusting of white over top. Some Lich Purple went on the gems and the spire (which, as any Eldar player worth his salt will tell you, comes from a Fire Prism tank). I don't normally like the way that drybrushing looks, so I rarely do it. Still, I really like actually doing it. It's a lot of fun. So when I find an opportunity where drybrushing is the perfect thing (as it was for this shrine), I am in there like a dirty shirt drybrushing my heart out. I think it worked nicely here. Nothing, and I mean nothing makes foam look more like stone than drybrushing.

The big score was that Reaper rune you see on the dome up top. It's actually clipped off of Maugen Ra's backpack; not my Maugen, though. My buddy Matt had a Maugen Ra and cannibalized it, and let me have the rune. I've held onto that for the better part of a year, knowing that somehow, somewhere, I'd have a use for it. Looks like the waiting paid off (he also gave me the Fire Prism thing I'm using for the spire).



In addition to making a pretty darn good looking shrine, I would also like some credit for not trying to work a "don't fear the reaper" joke into this post. It crossed my mind, believe me... but I like to think I'm better than that.

Countdown

The time is near. You might remember that many months ago I mentioned that we have a game coming up and... it's one week from today. After much planning and corralling to get six Eldar players into one room for a megabattle, the time is upon us.

Part of the project is the creation of shrines, as I believe you might remember (if you follow this blog regularly, that is). Some of that stuff is actually underway now. You'll see that the work on the Reaper shrine is coming along. You'll might think it has little resemblance to the pic that inspired me, but in my mind the pic did actually give birth to the finished product. I just did a lot of altering along the way. You'll notice there's a scooped-out alcove and I'm going to put Maugen Ra in there, painted up to look like a statue. Last but not least, it will be covered from top to bottom with skulls, embedded in drywall compound.

Oh, suppose I should explain the googly eyes glued to every corner. Benoit gave me those last night. I'm going to paint them over as gems. For the time being, however, they look pretty funny if you ask me.



Moving right along, we have a Wraithgate here. Or is that a Warp Gate? Or is that... er... I dunno.

Eldar players will recognize the familiar shape of the archway. There are various doo-dads glued to the base. Like a lot of the foam stuff I do, both the Wraithgate and the Reaper shrine will look a whole lot better once they're painted.



Finally... remember these guys?